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A few weeks ago a friend recommended I check out a band called Blonde Redhead. I'd never heard of them before, and the tickets were $25 a piece...so I was reluctant to pay $25 to see a band I'd never heard of. I did some googling on them and saw that a public radio station was giving away free tickets to the show for members. The memberships happened to start at $25...I figured, I love public radio, tv, spirit, and if I don't win the tickets it's going to a good cause. I became a member...and I won! Off I go to a venue called Terminal 55. Being that I'd never heard of them and I met this guy at the Knitting Factory, I was expecting it to be 100 or so people and some small dive. It was actually a massive venue and maybe my favorite in the city. Unable to find anyone I knew amongst the seemingly thousands of people, I went up to the top balcony, grabbed a strong drink and picked out a spot about 50 feet in the air.

Usually the first acts are something you want to end quickly. But I was digging these guys called School of Seven Bells. Their guitarist reminded me of Johnny Greenwood because he was constantly messing around with all kinds of electronics when in between guitar sections.

By the time Blonde Redhead finished their first song, I was greatful to the lottery gods who gave me these tickets. I was really happy because finding new music that you like is pretty rare when you think about it.

So, here I was absorbing all of these brand new songs that I found to be both stimilating and soothing, and I was just taking it all in. Then Blonde Redhead plays this song called The Dress. At some point during the song my facial muscles inexplicably begin contractin, and then all of a sudden water is pouring out of my eyes. Why the hell? I wasn't crying or anything, similar but not quite. It was like cryings' twin, the happy sob. I laughed when it was over. It felt great actually.

Anyway, I stumble home and make a drunken post in my music appreciation club, because they would understand of course. I forgot about it until today...here's the reaction: 

Yeah right? Good peoples. Then I saw the video for the song. And realized two things: 1) I must have looked like a complete faker at the club, but more importantly 2) I think I truly understood the emotion of the song.

Here it is:

  I remember as a kid watching the Space Shuttle launches in school. That is a problem. Because after looking into it, the Space Shuttle program was cancelled during those memories of mine. What does this mean? Well, my teachers were actually making us watch the Space Shuttle Challenger's tragic mission to eternity. Each, and every year. Why would they do this? I can only imagine it was because the first and last teacher to be placed on the shuttle, as part of the Teachers in Space program, was on that doomed flight, and maybe they had some teachers' pride thing going on. Because just once would have been enough if they were trying to teach us about it. I mean really. I remember everything that happens when the TV & VCR are wheeled in and the lights go out (Voyage of the Mimi). That was like my favorite part of school.

Anyway...I always thought that the Challenger blew up and those poor astronauts had no idea what'd happened. I liked to think they they were having the time of their lives blasting off into space. I really dreamed about it myself and imagined it being pretty wonderful. Not the speed of it, but there must be an actually feeling to it. Because it's not really about the speed is it? It's more about Earth is, as far as we're concerned, a big-ass planet with all this gravity holding us down. Sure the speed must be fun, but somehow I always imagined a point when the rockets kicked in and you thought to yourself, "oh my god, gravity lost! Oh crap, goodbye planet!" And that would be the fun part. I always pictured the astronauts smiling wildly from that sensation, and that being the last feeling they had. Yeah, well I was wrong, and now I have a new picture that I would like to share with everyone else who thinks the shuttle exploded.

First if the Shuttle exploded, that would still be terrible...but I think I explained why it's the best terrible way to die. The reality is that the shuttle didn't explode at all. What looks like a giant cloud of exploding rocketfuel is really just vapor from the liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen propellant turning to gasses (would that make water?). It turns out the Shuttle disintegrated, ripped apart by...Aether, the Greek God of Air or something of that nature. If you watch a video of the event, you'll see the countdown, the kick in the pants, the OMG GRAVITY LOST!! moment, the Greek God of Air rip the Shuttle apart and throw the two smaller rockets out of his personal zone. I'm not sure if I've ever actually seen it or if it's just pieces of the shuttle falling, but NASA has these videos where you can see all of that happen, as well as the crew cabin, still intact "drift" up another 3-4 miles reach that point where infinity happens, and then begin freefalling. The freefall lasts for a few minutes.

This is where my nice picture of the Challenger crew's final moments turns into a horror show. The crew had Personal Egress Air Packs which supplied about six minutes of oxygen in case they neeeded it for whatever emergency, before reaching outer-space. But you had to manually activate these air packs. The air packs of mission specialist Ellison Onizuka, mission specialist Judith Resnik and pilot Michael J. Smith, were activated. In the case of pilot Smith, his pack was on the back of his seat, so Onizuka or Resnik turned it on for him. Whichever way it went down, it's somehow already so much more terrible than them exploding. NASA found that the amount of oxygen consumed agreed with how much would have been needed for the few minutes of the descent, which ended at freefall-speed when the cabin met with the surface of the ocean. It turns out that in some poetic example of what it is to be an individual in the universe, nothing ever touches anything else. The electrons on atoms keep other atoms from ever touching each it, since electrons have the same charge they repel other electrons. The ocean never actually touched the cabin...it just pushed it away from it, in a terribly violent version of OMG GRAVITY LOST!!. If gravity would have won here, the cabin would plop into the ocean and maybe pop back out a few minutes later (or hit the bottom of the ocean, and maybe later burn up in the core of the earth...but whatever). 

The point is that it's possible the astronauts on board Challenger were aware of what was happening...living through their deaths rather than going out in the joyous explosion like I'd always imagined. That happened 22 years ago, tomorrow.